Diet-related illnesses are a growing burden on the United States economy, worsening health disparities and affecting national security, according to a document published Monday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
About 46% of adults in the country have a low-quality general diet, and this number rises to 56% for children, according to the document.
Meanwhile, US health spending has almost tripled between 1979 and 2018, from 6.9% to 17.7% of gross domestic product. These increases in health spending, the advisory group said, affect government budgets, the competitiveness of the US private sector, and workers’ wages.
“While social and economic factors such as low education, poverty, bias and reduced opportunities are the main contributors to population disparities, they are also important barriers to access to healthy food and adequate nutrition,” it is read in the document.
“Poor diets lead to a hard cycle of lower academic performance in school, loss of productivity at work, increased risk of chronic disease, higher pocket health costs, and poverty for the most vulnerable Americans.”
Lack of proper nutrition is also a threat to national security, the newspaper said, claiming that diet-related illnesses are hurting the readiness of the US military and the budgets of the US Department of Defense. And the US Department of Veterans Affairs.
Seventy-one percent of people between the ages of 17 and 24 do not qualify for military service, and obesity is the leading medical disqualifier, the newspaper said, citing numbers from a 2018 report.
Need for more investment in nutrition.
The authors of the article called for expanding federal investment in nutrition science by creating a new Office of the National Director of Food and Nutrition or a new United States Task Force on Federal Nutrition Research, with the goal of improve coordination within agencies that budget for research. on this issue.
The document also called for “accelerating and strengthening” nutritional research within the National Institutes of Health by creating a new National Institute of Nutrition.
“Every day, our country suffers massive health, social and economic costs of poor diets,” said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, co-author of the article and dean and professor of nutrition Jean Mayer at the School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Friedman at Tufts University.
In a statement, Mozaffarian called for a “great national effort to address current nutritional challenges, generating critical science to rapidly treat and prevent diet-related illnesses, improve health equity, increase the resilience of the population to Covid- 19 and future pandemics, and driving fundamentals and translational discoveries for a better life. “
.
